Sharon Stern took her own life. The 33-year-old had spent part of the previous three years traveling the world with a Japanese dance master known as Katsura Kan, teaching workshops and performing. One video shows them on a black stage, side by side. They are barefoot and nude from the waist up, and their faces are grim. Twin spotlights illuminate them as they slowly pivot away from the audience and hunch their backs in unison, as if cowering. The stage is silent except for a few piano notes that reverberate and then fade. With their backs to the audience, the two extend their right hands above their heads. They close their fists to knock on a pair of invisible doors.
When they turn around again, they each hold a palm stiffly to their foreheads. Their fingers slide down their faces and into their mouths, and they both pretend to regurgitate strings.
They are performing butoh, a type of dance that debuted in Japan in 1959. Its inventor called his creation ankoku butoh, which translates to “dance of darkness.” Kan, who is from Kyoto, has been dancing butoh since 1979. In 2007 and 2008, he spent eleven weeks teaching at Naropa University in Boulder. Sharon was a student then, studying for a Master of Fine Arts degree so that she could become a teacher. That’s how they met.
After she graduated, in 2009, she put her teaching ambitions on hold to follow Kan. But her parents claim that by that point, she was no longer in control of her life. Kan had seduced and abused her, they say, and stripped her of her free will; under the guise of making her a better butoh dancer, he actually made her his slave. She turned on her family and divorced her husband, who had moved with her from Florida to Colorado so that she could attend Naropa. When Sharon began to show signs of mental illness, her parents claim, Kan rejected her. They have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against him, alleging that his abandonment drove her to suicide.
Neither Kan nor his former lawyer responded to requests for comment for this story. (Kan is currently representing himself.)
Sharon’s parents also blame Naropa. But the Buddhist-influenced university denies any wrongdoing. President Chuck Lief says Kan was a respected dancer who had taught at other colleges before he came to Naropa. An internal investigation turned up no evidence that anything inappropriate had taken place when Sharon was a student.
“If we don’t receive complaints or statements of concern from people — if we don’t have reason to believe anything unprofessional is going on — then I don’t feel that Naropa is responsible for the eventual tragic end of her life,” Lief says.
Some of Sharon’s classmates agree. Although Sharon seemed drawn to butoh and to Kan, they say they never suspected anything sinister. And while her classmates were shocked when they learned of her death, they don’t fault Naropa for failing to predict it.
But her family does, as do some of her childhood friends. The way her parents see it, it was Naropa that hired the man who took hold of their happy and loving daughter — the one they affectionately called Sharoni, who earned straight A’s and was always singing — and didn’t let go until it was too late.
“I sent a healthy girl to Naropa,” her father says. “I got her back in a casket.”
Sharon grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, with her parents and her older brother, Ron. Her parents are immigrants — her father, Tibor, spent his childhood in Czechoslovakia, and her mother, Hana, is from Israel — who became successful diamond dealers.
From the beginning, her mother says, they encouraged Sharon’s artistic personality. When Sharon was three years old, her parents enrolled her in ballet classes. She went to a private Jewish school, where she earned national accolades for poems she wrote in Hebrew. She also wrote short stories and played piano and guitar. In high school, Sharon began singing and acting. Her mother remembers one play called I Never Saw Another Butterfly, in which Sharon played a child in a concentration camp. There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience. Afterward, her mother says, a Holocaust survivor came up to Sharon and hugged and kissed her.
“Sharoni was a perfect child,” Hana says. “She was very multi-talented.” And happy: “When she opened the door, she opened the door with singing. She was a spiritual, wonderful human being who had no drop of badness in her bones.”
Childhood friend Thabatta Schwartz Mizrahi says Sharon was so bubbly that friends called her the Energizer Bunny. “Sharon was very much about the now,” she says. “I think that’s what drew people in to her. She was like, ‘Forget about tomorrow. Let’s have fun right now.’”
Original Article http://www.westword.com/news/for-ex-naropa-dancer-sharon-stern-a-life-of-artistry-ended-in-darkness-6725987